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Greening the campus: contemporary student
environmental activism
Radical Teacher, Spring 2007
From Opposing Viewpoints in Context
In November 1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) iss
ued a report entitled "World Scientists'
Warning to Humanity." Written by UCS Chair Henry Kendall an
d signed by 1,700 of the world's leading
scientists, including the majority of Nobel laureates in the scien
ces, the report's admonition was conveyed in
the strongest terms:
Human beings and the natural
world are on a collision course.
Human activities inflict harsh and
often irreversible damage on the
environment and on critical
resources. If not checked, many of
our current practices put at serious
risk the future that we wish for
human society and the plant and
animal kingdoms, and may so alter
the living world that it will be unable
to sustain life in the manner that we
know. Fundamental changes are
urgent if we are to avoid the collision

our present course will bring about. (1)
As Ross Gelbspan has documented, warnings issued by the UCS
and similar groups were met with a well-
funded and orchestrated corporate campaign of fake science, sca
remongering, and political smearing that
effectively killed off efforts to address human beings' collision
course with the planet's natural limits. (2) Nine
years after the UCS issued its stark alarm, the Intergovernmenta
l Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
unequivocally confirmed UCS claims concerning the unsustaina
bility of contemporary industrial civilization's
growing levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon emissions
have continued to rise notwithstanding both
the IPCC's report and the "World Scientists' Warning." The worl
d, and, in particular, wealthy industrialized
nations such as the United States, must reverse course dramatica
lly if cataclysmic environmental collapse
is to be avoided. Measures such as the Kyoto Protocol (1997), w
hich essentially seek to cap emissions at
unsustainable levels, fail to address the coming crisis adequatel
y. Indeed, recent estimates conclude that
developed countries will have to cut their emissions by at least
70 percent over the next thirty years if
temperatures are to be kept from rising above the danger point o
f two degrees centigrade in excess of pre-
industrial levels. (3) This is clearly a massive task, one that will
require a dramatic reorientation of both the
material and ideological underpinnings of developed and industr
ializing countries.
As those responsible for training the scientists, entrepreneurs, a
nd opinion-makers of tomorrow, educators
in general and institutions of higher learning in particular have
a critical role to play in this race to save the
planet for habitation by human beings and other species. Despit

e its important role as our society's primary
site of credentialization and putative moral pillar of our culture,
academia has been disappointingly lethargic
and tepid in its response to the global climate crisis. As James
Gustave Speth lamented recently, in spite of
the gravity of climate change, "there is no march on Washington
; students are not in the streets; consumers
are not rejecting destructive lifestyles; Congress is not passing f
ar-reaching legislation ..." (4) Over the last
several years, however, a student environmental movement has
grown up that promises to inject a
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heightened sense of urgency into academia's discussion of envir
onmental issues and thereby to fuel a
much-needed renaissance of the environmental movement in the
United States. (5) This essay profiles
several of the most prominent student environmental initiatives
of recent years, highlighting the organizing
success of groups such as Energy Action and the California Stud
ent Sustainability Coalition while also
interrogating the limits of their campaigns. Despite their shortc
omings, grassroots student initiatives are one
of the most hopeful developments during a period when global c
limate change, resource wars, and the
many other forms of contemporary ecological degradation that a
re robbing young people of their collective
future are being challenged by all too few voices.
Events such as the melting of the polar ice cap and the destructi
on wrought by Hurricane Katrina have

recently helped to galvanize a student movement around the issu
e of climate change. One of the
organizations to take the lead in this regard is Energy Action, a
group founded by students from Temple
University and the University of California. (6) The principle in
itiative undertaken by Energy Action thus far is
the Campus Climate Challenge, a project that aims to organize s
tudents on college campuses and in high
schools across North America to convert their schools to 100 pe
rcent clean energy policies. (7) Energy
Action steering committee member and cofounder Kim Teplitsk
y argues that her generation has realized
that "unless we deal with [climate change], most other things w
on't matter. The progressive movement as a
whole is moving this way. Global warming is also a social justic
e and human rights issue, and offers a way
for all progressive groups to come together because it affects ev
erything."" Since the inception of the
Campus Climate Challenge in the spring of 2004, 324 institutio
ns have signed the pledge to convert to
sustainable energy.
Radical pedagogy played an important role in sparking the Ener
gy Action initiatives at campuses such as
Temple. Indeed, Kim Teplitsky argues that progressive teaching
methods were fundamental to the climate
challenge initiative since it was in an environmental studies clas
s in which her professor allowed students to
follow their own research passions that she first began researchi
ng wind power as a possible alternative
energy source for Temple. (9) According to Teplitsky, "The mos
t valuable classes and lessons were those
where students could think about the meaning of education in re
lation to world around them." For a young
activist such as Teplitsky, education that is oriented to contemp
orary social challenges, including that of

climate change, offers a tonic to the forms of insularity and dep
oliticization that have become endemic in
contemporary US society. (10) As she puts it, "People are buyin
g bigger houses and shutting the doors
tight. (11)
Teplitsky is quick, however, to challenge the notion that contem
porary students are apathetic. Young people,
she stresses, fed overwhelmed by the many severe challenges co
nfronting them and often lack a sense of
how to effect concrete change: "they care about many things but
don't know how to make an impact. (12)
Environmental activists, it is true, have responded to the campai
gn of fake science and the refusal of public
figures to face climate change using apocalyptic rhetoric that ca
n be numbing, leaving potential young
activists with a sense of the futility of engagement given the im
pending collapse of natural ecosystems. As
Mark Hertsgaard underlined in a survey of the contemporary en
vironmental movement, the surge of
grassroots environmental activism, in which the student movem
ent has played a key role over the last
several years, is notable for eschewing such gloomy rhetoric in
order to focus on economically attractive
solutions to environmental problems. (13) This, of course, is the
genius of the Campus Climate Challenge,
which offers a tightly focused campaign around which both stud
ents and forward thinking faculty and
administrators can rally. Given the dramatic escalation in energ
y costs over the last several years, support
for alternative energy can be pitched to penny-pinching college
and university administrators as an
economic no-brainer as well as a potential publicity bonanza for
their institutions.
Perhaps the most significant success in this drive to make colleg

es and universities sustainable has been
the California Student Sustainability Coalition (CSSC) campaig
n around a resolution calling for a system-
3/8
wide mandate for all new and renovated UC buildings to be con
structed to LEED silver standards or higher
and to use 50 percent renewable energy, half of which is to be p
roduced onsite through solar generation.
(14) CSSC began their drive during the 2002-2003 academic yea
r with a campaign co-organized with
Greenpeace that took the motto "UC Go Solar" as its organizing
slogan. During this year, CSSC gathered
thousands of student signatures in support of the initiative to gr
een the entire UC system using solar power.
In June 2003, the Board of Regents passed the policy unanimous
ly. Following this success, however,
Greenpeace moved on to organize other campuses, leaving CSS
C "with no money, no coordinator, and
limited means of communication." (15) While these losses obvio
usly set CSSC back, the organization
regrouped, building a UC-based network pursuing a series of sig
nificant projects, including plans for
curricular transformation and transportation infrastructure.
Not only did the CSSC campaign call for work with every stude
nt government of every campus in the vast
UC system, but it also required cooperation with the UC Office
of the President and with the UC Board of
Regents. In order to achieve victories, in other words, student e
nvironmental activists have had to learn how

to win and sustain the support of powerful figures in their colle
ge and university administration. This is often
quite a challenge given the myriad drains on administrators' atte
ntion and funds as well as the rapid
turnover of the student population. As Audrey Chang underlines
in her account of the campaign to develop
a comprehensive set of sustainability guidelines for building at
Stanford University, adopting a collaborative
approach to the administration has become a key strategy for yo
ung activists. (16) According to Chang, her
group was able to gain administrators' attention and support bec
ause, "our group was diverse, with
representation from various fields; we were persistent; we conce
ntrated on personal contact; we took a
professional and cooperative approach." (17)
In tandem with this focus on pragmatic change and on garnering
support from key players, the student
environmental movement is notable for its emphasis on coalitio
n building. Departing from the model of elite,
Washington-based environmental lobby groups, Energy Action a
nd similar groups are part of a coalition of
twenty-eight organizations based in both institutions of higher e
ducation and local communities. Many of the
students currently engaged in the environmental movement have
benefited from programs established by
groups such as the Center for American Progress, which aims to
train and mentor young activists while also
helping them establish the kinds of organizational networks that
will empower their local efforts to effect
change. (18) Particularly important in this regard, according to
Kim Teplitsky, is the contemporary student
movement's emphasis on issues of environmental justice. Establ
ished organizations such as the Sierra
Club have been paying lip service to the disproportionate impac
t of environmental degradation on people of

color and poor communities since the emergence of the environ
mental justice movement over a decade
ago, but Teplitsky stresses that the student movement has consci
ously sought to address such issues by
reaching out to marginalized youths: "we're trying to focus on g
etting money to communities where it hasn't
been to help youths who've been marginalized. We're always thi
nking of training and bringing leaders into
the movement." (19) Given the lily-white, well-heeled character
of the mainstream environmental
movement's leadership, such initiatives to empower diverse lead
ership cadres of the future are particularly
important.
Transformation of the environmental footprint of institutions of
higher learning is only one component of a
much broader change in the culture of academia that the student
environmental movement is seeking to
promote. In addition to such material changes, the student move
ment is pushing for a revolution in the
content and process of education. Although environmental studi
es programs have been around since the
late 1960s, they tend to have a relatively isolated profile as spec
ial departments that attract a small if highly
motivated portion of the student body. There are few colleges a
nd universities in which issues of
sustainability and the environment are a part of the core curricul
um. As a result, students are often able to
progress through the final stage of their formal education with li
ttle or no consideration of the impact of
human beings in the ecosystems that support life on Earth. In a
direct challenge to the

4/8
compartmentalization of the disciplines, groups such as the Cali
fornia Student Sustainability Coalition have
Struggled to establish student-driven courses on sustainability s
uch as the Education for Sustainable Living
Program. (20) ESLP courses, organized through local UC campu
ses, are grounded in autonomously
organized groups in which "students form action research teams
in partnership with guest lecturers, faculty,
administration, and community members to implement tangible
change." (21) In addition to seeking to
promote novel interdisciplinary forums, student activists tend to
push curricular reform beyond issues of
content alone to transformation of the educational process throu
gh experiential learning. The hope is that
pedagogical projects that prod students to deploy their knowled
ge in real-world contexts will "inspire
participants to internalize the concept of sustainability, and carr
y it in practice beyond academia into a
greater society." (22) In addition to such wholly student-directe
d projects, increasing opportunities for course
work in environmental studies are being made available across t
he curriculum through initiatives such as
the Ponderosa Project, a faculty development program begun at
Northern Arizona University that is now
emulated around the country. (23)
Surprisingly, curricular reform has been just as difficult to impl
ement as diminution of academia's heavy
physical ecological footprint. Temple University student activist
Josh Meyers, who helped design a course
on environmental studies for the university's honors program, de
scribes the difficulty in garnering funding for
such interdisciplinary courses. (24) Meyers recalls a federally f

unded course on nuclear energy that was
taught at Temple during the 1970s; with nine professors from di
fferent fields in the classroom at once,
students were able to hear lively debates about energy policy. W
hen federal funds ran out, however, "the
administration killed it." (25) Little has changed since then. In f
act, the professors who lectured for the
interdisciplinary honors course Meyers helped design all worke
d gratis. Unless an institution is lucky enough
to snag a significant external grant, there tend to be relatively fe
w revenue sources for the kind of
interdisciplinary teaching initiatives that issues of sustainability
inherently raise. Even impressive, multi-year
programs such as the Ponderosa Project aim to place educators i
n dialogue with one another only outside
the classroom. As a result, each newly developed course offers
a fascinating but necessarily fragmentary
snapshot on the topic of environmentalism. (26) Scientists still
don't really talk to humanities scholars, and
vice versa. Students intent on understanding both the ideology a
nd the science that drives environmental
degradation consequently face significant hurdles.
In addition, Josh Meyers notes that the kind of experiential lear
ning embraced by organizers of the
Education for Sustainable Living Program is very difficult to im
plement. For Meyers, "The course didn't have
an action incentive. How do you grade effort?" (27) Not only w
as it difficult to create workable action
incentives for students, who are more grade-driven today than e
ver given the difficulty of landing good jobs
upon graduation, but, Meyers argues, few students seemed willi
ng to break out of an academic mindset in
which education is attached to individual credentialization rathe
r than collective social transformation. (28)
As a result, in the course he helped design, almost all of the stu

dents elected to write a traditional academic
paper rather than carrying out some sort of practical environmen
tal project in the poor community where
Temple is located. Despite these problems in implementing a ra
dical environmental pedagogy, Meyers is
quite sanguine about the future of the environmental movement
on campus. Reacting to a Thomas
Friedman editorial on the silence of students in the face of clim
ate change, he notes that students now see
switching to an environmental studies degree as a canny career
move. This undoubtedly has something to
do with the "green washing" strategies of major corporations su
ch as Wal-Mart, which is moving to cut its
waste stream, but, for Meyers, it is more significantly related to
a general transformation of consciousness
in the U.S. As he puts it, "Even if we don't have a government
willing to take the lead on climate change,
people are catching on." (29)
The obduracy of disciplinary fragmentation may catch some ide
alistic student activists by surprise, but such
fragmentation can only be seen as an inherent characteristic of a
system calibrated to meet the needs of a
society organized by the dictates of capital. In his history of hig
her education in the US since the late
5/8
nineteenth century, Stanley Aronowitz notes that the main task
of higher education has been to transmit
technical knowledge to students. (30) The vocationalization and
fragmentation of higher learning has

intensified dramatically over the last thirty years as academic re
search has become increasingly
commodified. Today, corporations exert significant control over
the research agendas of many public and
private institutions, leading not only to serious ethical concerns
about scientific experimentation but also to
significant disincentives to questioning the short-sighted, botto
m-line mentality that tends to drive
corporations. While molecular biologists have metamorphosed i
nto corporate CEOs, their unfortunate
relations in the less remunerative branches of the humanities ha
ve been squeezed of funding and have
seen the control they once exercised over their institutions throu
gh faculty democracy eroded by
administrative centralization and the corporate-style downsizing
of the teaching staff. Unless and until
student activists begin to challenge this trend toward academic c
apitalism, they are unlikely to find their
hunger for a transformative sustainability curriculum slaked. W
hile particular administrators may be content
to indulge in experiments in interdisciplinary pedagogy, the und
erlying structural trend is away from such
holistic approaches to education. Although a tight focus and pra
gmatism have undoubtedly been boons to
the fledgling student environmental movement, student activists
need to see these trends towards academic
capitalism, which are so inimical to their long-term goals of fos
tering sustainability within academia, for what
they are and to find ways to challenge such trends.
The limitations of pragmatism will also inevitably need to be co
nfronted in the realm of material
transformation, the arena in which they would seem to be the str
ongest. While it might make immediate
sense to sell clean energy initiatives to university administrators
using economistic, non-ideological

arguments about saving money, there is no guarantee that such s
teps will help save the planet in the long
term. For, if universities are increasingly run along corporate li
nes, student activists need to be aware of a
basic truth expressed with inimitable clarity by Rachel Carson i
n 1963: the increasing reduction of nature to
factory-like forms of organization in the interest of rapid econo
mic returns lies behind our worst ecological
problems. (31) The ecological tyranny of the bottom line pertain
s just as much in academic capitalism as it
does in other sectors of the corporate world order. As a consequ
ence, there is little to guarantee that
savings recouped through campus green building programs will
not be plowed right back into energy-
consuming and waste-producing university expansion programs.
Indeed, Jevons' paradox would seem to
predict precisely such an outcome. According to Jevons, "Increa
sing efficiency in using a natural resource
such as coal only results in increased demand for that resource,
not a reduction in demand ... because
improvement in efficiency leads to a rising scale of production."
(32)
Given the severe ideological climate in the contemporary US, it
is perhaps not surprising that young
environmental activists should seek to avoid musty grand narrat
ives such as a critique of capitalism. Today,
getting a green roof installed on a university chemistry building
, a campus-wide recycling program up and
running, or even some locally grown crops served in the local di
ning hall constitutes a pioneering victory.
That said, student leaders in the environmental movement are ce
rtainly aware of some of the contradictions
of capitalism. For them, the environmental crisis is also an empl
oyment crisis. As Kim Teplitsky puts it,
"People in youth movements tend to be much more radical than

adults. Our generation is seeing our job
prospects collapse, so we know about it." Yet in the next breath,
she goes on to suggest that government
rather than capitalism is the problem: "Capitalism is part of the
solution. The government is not supporting
renewables; it's happening through the market. Our biggest prob
lem is corrupt governments, corporate
welfare, and the support of dictatorial regimes." (33) Teplitsky's
perspective is clearly shaped by the
reactionary policies of the Bush regime, which has represented t
he central obstacle to progressive
environmental action on both a national and a global level since
she and her cohort cut their activist teeth.
Yet Teplitsky's comments reveal a strange unwillingness or fail
ure to connect our reactionary political
circumstances to the dynamics of neoliberal accumulation.
6/8
Young activists like Meyers, Chang, and Teplitsky demonstrate
impressive instincts for coalition building and
for forging pragmatic reform. In the coming years, they and oth
er student leaders will throw their
considerable energies into making universities a model for socie
ty in general, fighting the next generation of
coal-burning power plants, and tackling environmental justice is
sues in the communities where universities
such as Temple are located. (34) In doing so, they will certainly
play a fundamental role in reviving the
environmental movement in the U.S. As important as such camp
aigns are, however, given the potentially
catastrophic effects of global climate change, the student enviro

nmental movement needs to confront the
world-devouring expansionist logic of the capitalist system itsel
f. (35) Without such a critique of the
foundations of the environmental crisis, the student environmen
tal movement runs the risk of engaging in
the form of evasion and denial that characterizes much contemp
orary discourse on "sustainability." As the
acerbic critic James Howard Kunstler suggests, this discourse a
mounts to little more than "a delusion that
we can keep the interstate highway system, Wal-Mart, Walt Dis
ney World, and all of the other furnishings of
the drive-in utopia running on biodiesel and used french-fry oil.
" (36)
NOTES
(1) http://deoxy.org/sciwarn.htm. Accessed September 22, 2006.
(2) Ross Gelbspan, The Heat is On: The Climate Crisis, the Cov
er-Up, and the Prescription (New York:
Perseus, 1998) and Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and
Coal, Journalists and Activists are Fueling
the Climate Crisis--and What We Can Do to Avert Disaster (Ne
w York: Basic, 2004).
(3) See "The Future Starts Here: The Route to a Low-Carbon Ec
onomy," a report published by Friends of
the Earth and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change. http://ww
w.foe.co.uk/ resource/reports/low_carbon_
economy.pdf. Accessed September 22, 2006.
(4) James Gustave Speth, "The Globe Is Warming. Why Aren't
We Marching?" The New York Times
(February 24, 2006): A22.
(5) One indication of the impact of this movement may be found

in a recent special issue of the Chronicle of
Higher Education focused on the issue of sustainability on camp
us. See, in particular, Scott Carlson, "In
Search of the Sustainable Campus: With Eyes on the Future, Un
iversities Try to Clean Up Their Acts,"
Chronicle of Higher Education 53.9 (October 20, 2006), A10.
(6) The Energy Action Coalitions website is http://www. energy
action.net/main. Accessed September 27,
2006.
(7) For details concerning the Campus Climate Challenge, see ht
tp:// climatechallenge.org. Accessed
September 27, 2006.
(8) Kim Teplitsky, Telephone interview, June 15, 2006.
(9) Ibid.
(10) The classic work in this regard is Robert D. Putnam's Bowl
ing Alone: The Collapse and Revival of
American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). F
or a more satisfying critical analysis of the
sources of contemporary depoliticization, see Gars Alperovitz,
America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our
Wealth, Our Liberty and Our Democracy (New York: Wiley 200
4).
7/8
(11) Teplitsky interview.

(12) Ibid.
(13) Mark Hertsgaard, "Green Goes Grassroots: The Environme
ntal Movement Today," The Nation 283.4
(July 31/August 7, 2006): 11-18.
(14) For more details, see the California Student Sustainability
Coalitions website at http://
sustainabilitycoalition.org/main/ ?q=node/3. Accessed 11/28/06.
(15) Ibid.
(16) Audrey Chang, "The Development of Stanford University's
Guidelines for Sustainable Buildings: A
Student Perspective," in Bartlett and Chase, 177-196.
(17) Chang, 182.
(20) For more details, see the Education for Sustainable Living
Project website at http://www. eslp.net.
Accessed September 27, 2006.
(21) Education for Sustainable Living Program mission stateme
nt. See http://www.eslp.net.
(22) Ibid.
(23) For an account of this initiative, see Geoffrey W. Chase an
d Paul Rowland, "The Ponderosa Project:
Infusing Sustainability into the Curriculum," in Bartlett and Cha
se, 91-106.

(24) Josh Meyers. Telephone interview. July 28, 2006.
(25) Ibid.
(26) For a sense of this fragmentariness, consult the Piedmont P
roject curriculum website at http://www.
scienceandsociety.emory.edu/ piedmont/curriculum.htm. Inspire
d by the Ponderosa Project, the Piedmont
Project retains disciplinary walls despite its otherwise impressiv
e emphasis on integrated learning.
(27) Meyers interview.
(28) Ibid.
(29) Ibid.
8/8
(30) Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling t
he Corporate University and Creating True
Higher Learning (Boston, Mass.: Beacon, 2000).
(31) Cited in John Bellamy Foster, Ecology Against Capitalism
(New York: Monthly Review, 2002), 24.
(32) Account of Jevons' paradox drawn from John Bellamy Fost
er, Ecology Against Capitalism, 94.
(33) Kim Teplitsky interview.

(35) For a detailed theoretical anatomy of the systemic characte
r of environmental crisis, see Joel Kovel,
The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the
World? (New York: Zed, 2002).
(36) Scott Carlson, "A Social Critic Warns of Upheavals to Com
e," Chronicle of Higher Education 53.9
(October 20, 2006), A19.
Dawson, Ashley
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2007 Center for Critical Education of
New York.
http://www.radicalteacher.com
Source Citation
Dawson, Ashley. "Greening the campus: contemporary student e
nvironmental activism."
Radical Teacher, Spring 2007, p. 19+. Opposing Viewpoints in
Context,
link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A165362289/OVIC?u=sunybuff_m
ain&xid=7f9571fa.
Accessed 7 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A165362289

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